TEMPE, Ariz.—Jordan Walden grew up in Mansfield, Texas, a town of fewer than 60,000 people just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of his baseball-loving acquaintances root for the Texas Rangers. They definitely don’t cheer much for the Los Angeles Angels despite Walden’s being their All-Star closer.

That meant none of Walden’s friends were too happy to wake him from a December slumber to inform him that the Angels, the Rangers’ chief rivals in the American League West, had just signed two of the biggest free agents on the market—Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson.

“I woke up to a bunch of phone calls and messages,” Walden said Tuesday morning before he took the field for the second official workout for the team’s pitchers and catchers. “My friends are diehard Ranger fans, so I don’t think they were too happy about it.”

Those moves have made the Angels the talk of the baseball world, and not just in Southern California. National media descended on Tempe for Monday’s news conference in which Pujols talked the talk before attempting to walk the walk for the only other organization he’s known besides the St. Louis Cardinals.

The national media were here again Tuesday, but the real scrum might not come until next Monday, when the team holds its first full-squad workout.

“That’s when the big bang is going to come,” said newly signed veteran reliever LaTroy Hawkins, who knows something about media attention since he pitched for the New York Yankees in 2008. “You can sort of feel that something is there, something is happening, but once everyone is here, that’s when it’ll get crazy.”

The Angels had better get used to it. After living just about its entire existence in the shadow of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the franchise nestled alongside Disneyland and those rich housewives in Orange County finally has taken over the spotlight for the foreseeable future.

The timing is perfect for a couple of reasons. In order to take over an area, especially one as big and plentiful and with as many diversions as Southern California, you have to strike while there is an opening. The Los Angeles Lakers are far from being the best team in the NBA and, most important, the Dodgers over the last two years have been something of an embarrassment—on and off the field—by their standards.

And with no football team other than USC, the Angels were able to drop in and snag everyone’s attention in December by announcing deals for Pujols and Wilson on the same morning, deals that total $317.5 million. Those moves have allowed the Angels occupy center stage all winter, only briefly being upstaged by the Los Angeles Clippers trading for Chris Paul.

Now Fox Sports plans to televise every “home” spring training game this year. The team’s flagship radio station, KLAA, is doing all it can to remind fans in Los Angeles and Orange counties that it carries every regular season game. And the team, along with those two media outlets, has thrown up billboards featuring a swinging Pujols with the words “EL HOMBRE” next to him despite Pujols’ having said in the past that he doesn’t want the same nickname as Cardinal great Stan Musial, no matter the language.

But this is a new day for Pujols, so for $240 million over the next 10 years and another 10-year deal to be involved with the franchise beyond that, Pujols won’t mind the moniker being posted above gridlocked freeways.

It’s also a new time for the Angels, one like it’s never experienced. Even when the team won the World Series in 2002, the attention paid to the team was nowhere close to what it is now. They’ll be the hottest ticket in the Cactus League come March and the most in-demand summer show in the Southland barring a surprise championship run by the Clippers or Lakers.

The Angels have missed the playoffs the last two seasons after playing into October in six of the previous eight, but it is easy to expect them to be back in the postseason this year because of their new acquisitions and the pieces they already had in place.

“We (had been) disappointed in our offseasons because things haven’t worked out for us, whether it was Carl Crawford or (Adrian) Beltre or Mark Teixeira,” said Jered Weaver, a Cy Young Award candidate. “Now we got the top two free agents in each category. We definitely look good on paper.

“But Boston looked good on paper, and things didn’t work out for them. The Yankees always look good on paper, and things didn’t work out for them. We still have to go out and prove we’re that good.”

And do it with all eyes on them.

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